045 - Video

[whattheytellyou]

[Sarah is looking...pretty good, actually. Rested, cheerful. More like her old self again.]

Interesting what a little "me" time will do for you.

[She holds up a battered field notebook to emphasize what she's discussing.]I've been aboard since January 4th. I was looking back through my old logs and doing considerable thinking about the

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[mrs_persson]

My childhood is something of a black hole in my memory, although thanks to certain recent insights provided by the Barge, I think it's pretty clear my tendency toward anarchism started there.

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[whattheytellyou]

You can't recall anything else? A favorite toy, a pet, where you attended school?

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[mrs_persson]

School was a series of fairly dreadful English boarding schools, and I think I must have gotten myself expelled from most of them.

What I remember is when I was quite small, I somehow convinced myself that God was German, and began all my prayers with "Dear Herr God." If I was bad, one of the archangels would appear to punish me, and I imagined him dressed in a grey field uniform with a spiked helmet. If I was good, I'd be left alone.

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[whattheytellyou]

Life's too chaotic for God to be a German. Even with the underlying patterns which emerge from chaos, it's too subtle for that sort of efficiency.

...Or militancy.

You sound like you were delightful.

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[mrs_persson]

I did figure that out eventually. I suppose a child gets the strangest ideas when growing up during and shortly after a war. Oh, the joys of finding pieces of unexploded ordnance and undischarged bullets. You'd stick the bullet in a vise and whack the end with a rock or a hammer. It's a wonder none of us were killed.

I think I must have been a bit of a horror, really.

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[whattheytellyou]

What year were you born?

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[mrs_persson]

...Early nineteen-forties. If I could be more specific, I would.

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[whattheytellyou]

That...actually explains a good deal about you. I wonder why I never asked before.

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[mrs_persson]

You mean the slightly old-fashioned diction and the pop-culture blind spots past 1980? [Joking.]

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[whattheytellyou]

Well, since you asked...

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[mrs_persson]

[Laughter.]